Acrobat Music is about to release the boxed set of live John Coltrane Quintet recordings, So Many Things: European Tour, 1961. The collection is billed as a sequel to Acrobat’s Miles Davis set, All of You: The Last Tour, 1960, which featured Coltrane and was his last trek with Miles. This time Trane is in charge, and the featured sideman is multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy. Dangerous Minds has a preview of So Many Things, a track that would become a significant Coltrane piece.

“Impressions” initially went by other names for years before it became the title song for John Coltrane’s 1963 LP. The composition was already a staple of his concerts in 1961, and would be a part of Trane’s live repertoire until 1965. One such performance of the tune took place during Coltrane’s first Finnish gig, which was held on November 22nd, 1961, in Helsinki.

In the boxed set’s liner notes, Simon Spillett writes that the version of “Impressions” from the Helsinki show “contains one of Eric Dolphy’s finest moments of the entire tour—an alto solo full of impossibly rangy lines, honks, and high harmonics,” and that Coltrane’s second solo is “overflowing with choked false-fingered passages and vocalized delves to the bottom of the horn.”

Impressions of John Coltrane is an excellent trio of television performances featuring John Coltrane, with his own quartet, the Miles Davis Quintet and alongside Eric Dolphy. Filmed between 1959 and 1963, each performance reveals the quality and range of the great man’s playing.

The first comes from the series The Jazz Casual, originally aired in 1963. Here you’ll find the perfect line-up of Coltrane (tenor sax/soprano sax), McCoy Tyner (piano), Jimmy Garrison (bass), and Elvin Jones (drums). This is said to be the only time Coltrane’s “classic” quartet was caught on camera. Together they give great versions of “Impressions” and “Afro Blue”.

The second is from 1959, and has Coltrane playing with the Miles David Quintet - Davis (flügelhorn/trumpet), Coltrane (tenor sax/alto sax), Wynton Kelly (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), and Jimmy Cobb (drums). They are accompanied by Gil Evans and a 15-piece orchestra. And certainly get going on “So What”, “The Duke”, “Blues for Pablo” and “New Rumba”.

The third is from West German TV in 1961, which shows Coltrane playing with Eric Dolphy (alto sax/flute), McCoy Tyner (piano), Reggie Workman (bass), and Elvin Jones (drums), who hit the spot with “My Favorite Things” and “Impressions”.

Let’s remember jazz saxophonist Eric Dolphy, who would have turned 88 today. Over his 30 albums as a bandleader, Dolphy showed an amazing versatility and development, emerging from his be-bop roots into some wonderfully accessible avant garde creations, like his last, Out to Lunch, for Blue Note.

People celebrate that album as a classic of new jazz for good reason. It’s innovative and gritty instead of abstract and simply free for its own sake, as Dolphy seems to transfigure the idea of melody rather than rejecting it out of hand. It’s simply beautiful and compelling, and worth having in your library if you don’t yet.

Dolphy’s death at 36 from diabetes in 1964 in Berlin was especially tragic because it wasn’t from typically regarded circumstances—he was substance-free and didn’t even smoke.

“He was a musical centipede,” notes drummer Han Bennink in the documentary below. “I could hear that he could do everything.”